Potential Projects and Mentors for 2025

Mentors and lab: Heather Soulen/Kristen Jabanoski, Research Communications Branch

Institution/Department: NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Director’s Office

Research Interests: Public communications, digital content development, social media management, digital media

Potential 2025 project: Our science center manages three social media accounts on behalf of our 4 laboratories and 1 field station: Facebook, X, and Instagram. Our main goals for these platforms are to promote understanding and appreciation of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s accomplishments and our value to local communities, and to generate interest in sustaining a healthy ocean. You will attend weekly content planning sessions and work with our social media manager, communications team, and subject matter experts to develop content, manage posting, monitor and respond to comments, and collect and report relevant statistics. Activities may include, but are not limited to: writing and editing, scheduling content, producing short videos, photography, creating digital art, and social media planning to connect our content to persuasive and interesting social media products. You can learn to use Adobe Creative Suite, or improve your existing skills. You will have the chance to work on media content directly relevant to current marine science issues such as offshore wind energy development, endangered species recovery, and how we are using new technologies in our work, including: environmental DNA, marine carbon capture, remote sensing, and remotely operated vehicles.

Type of work: Writing, editing and producing written and digital projects to promote understanding and appreciation of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center accomplishments and our value to local communities, and to generate interest in sustaining a healthy ocean.

Mentor and lab: Kristen Jabanoski, Research Communications Branch

Institution/Department: NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center /Director’s Office

Research Interests: Public communications, communications research, shellfish aquaculture, public perceptions

Potential 2025 project:

This project will focus on assessing the role of the media on public perceptions of shellfish aquaculture in Southern New England (Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts). It would be ideal for a student interested in science communications, communications research, and/or journalism. Students will use quantitative media content analysis, a staple of mass communication research, to investigate news articles about shellfish aquaculture over the past 10 years in local news publications in each of the three states. The final product will be a report quantitatively and qualitatively describing trends in news coverage.

Students will work with their mentor to choose articles to analyze from several key newspapers, code each article, and use intercoder comparison to ensure consistency in coding decisions. We will code each article based on the publication date to evaluate trends in coverage over time. We’ll be looking at variables such as sentiment toward shellfish aquaculture, sources of information used, type of shellfish aquaculture discussed. We will also code articles based on themes: environment, science, sustainability, health, economy, benefit and risk. The final report will provide a greater understanding of how the local and regional media covers shellfish aquaculture, how events during that time period shaped trends in coverage, and how media coverage affects public perceptions. This information will inform education and outreach efforts focused on shellfish aquaculture.

Type of work: Writing, editing, reading and coding articles, statistical analysis.

Mentor(s): Christopher Neill

Institution/Department: Woodwell Climate Research Center

Research Interests: I am Interested in: (1) understanding the factors that enhance the success of ecological restoration of wetlands and grassland and the ways that ecological restoration—and the ecosystems services that restored ecosystems provide—can contribute to regional resiliency and improved water quality in the face of nutrient pollution climate change; and (2) enhancing the methods that we use to measure river and estuarine water quality, and particularly the potential to learn from increased use of continuously-recording water quality sensors.

Potential 2025 Project(s): Students could have the potential to participate in: (1) studies of the effects of restoration of former cranberry agriculture on soils and water quality, and (2) studies of how different methods of managing disturbances (such as mowing and burning) influence the species composition and biological diversity of coastal grasslands

Mentor(s) and lab: Lauren Mullineaux, Rodrigo Zúñiga, and Susan Mills, Benthic Ecology Lab

Institution/Department: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Biology Department

Potential 2025 project(s): Our lab studies the resilience of seafloor animal communities to disturbance, both natural and human. We investigate how the dispersal and settlement behaviors of planktonic larvae influence species’ ability to persist in the face of environmental perturbations (including climate change), and habitat disruptions such as seafloor eruptions. We work as a team, using field observations, laboratory experiments, and mathematical models to understand how larvae respond to environmental cues and connect remote communities. Our research helps solve problems in aquaculture and fisheries management and inform policy on deep-sea mining. The team thrives on input from diverse perspectives and is committed to the highest standards of professionalism, including research integrity, collaboration, and respect for colleagues at all levels.

Type of work: Students will have an opportunity to gain research skills in oceanography and ecology, including data visualization and analysis in R, Python and/or Matlab, in one of several different projects:

Recolonization of deep-sea vents after catastrophic eruption (specimen identification and analysis of community composition),
Larval behavioral responses to chemical settlement cues (live animal experimentation, animal tracking, and movement analysis),
Biodiversity in newly discovered ecosystem at inactive vent sulfide features (specimen identification, GIS mapping, distribution and diversity analyses)
Movement ecology of deep-sea grazers (seafloor image processing and movement analysis)

Mentor(s) and lab: Weifu Guo

Institution/Department: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Research Interests: Coral reefs in a changing climate: The past is the key to the future

Potential 2025 project(s): Coral reefs are among the most diverse ecosystems on Earth, with enormous cultural, ecological, and economic values. However, coral reefs today face many global and local environmental stressors, such as warming, acidification, sea level rise, and pollution. To accurately project the fates of coral reefs in the future, it is important to understand past environmental changes on coral reefs and their impacts. We invite motivated students to join us in two potential research projects:

(1) Reconstruction of high-resolution temperature and pH changes on coral reefs. The calcium carbonate skeletons of stony corals are the main building blocks of the reef structure. They not only provide shelters and substrates for a myriad of reef organisms, but also record past changes in reef environments and corals’ responses to these changes. This project aims to extract such information from coral skeletons through mechanistic understanding of their chemical compositions.

(2) (De)coupling of reef and ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is considered an important threat to coral reef ecosystems because it reduces the availability of carbonate ions that reef-building corals need to produce their skeletons. However, it is not exactly clear how the global trend of ocean acidification would translate into the acidification of reef water, hindering accurate projection of impact of ocean acidification on global reefs. This project aims to address this challenge and develop a quantitative framework linking reef and ocean acidification.

Type of work: The projects will primarily involve data analysis and numerical modeling, particularly the synthesis of published datasets related to reef and coral chemistry.

Mentor(s) and lab: Marine (Yaqin ) Liu, MarineEcon Lab

Institution/Department: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Marine Policy Center

Research Interests: The Future of Fishing and Fishing Communities in a Changing Climate

Potential 2025 project(s): Fishing in the high seas (64% of the global ocean beyond national jurisdiction) has expanded with advanced technologies. Concerns on overfished species, fragile habitats, and biodiversity have led to the signing of the High Seas Treaty. The successful implementation of the treaty comes with the challenge of understanding the complex dynamics of ocean-human interactions affected by climate change. High-seas fisheries are an important economic resource, amounting to around 6% of global catch and 8% of the global fishing revenue in 2014. We will build a boosted regression tree (BRT) hurdle model to relate physical oceanographic variables with fishing effort distributions. We will estimate and validate the model with data from 2012-2020 of longline vessels in the Indian Ocean and forecast fishing grounds of longline vessels up to 2100.

Type of work: In this project, student can learn about compiling public data, handling geo-temporal physical oceanographic and fishing data, building machine learning models, conducting statistical analysis, and practicing graphic presentation of results. Coding in R or Python is required.

Mentor(s) and lab: Dr. Sean A. Hayes

Institution/Department: NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center- Protected Species Division

Research Interests: I like to build research programs that address the ecological challenges of our marine resources in order to remove the ambiguity around stakeholder concerns around everything from fishing gear entanglement to offshore energy development, thus enabling managers and stakeholders to make scientifically informed decisions to ensure sustainability of our marine resources. I’m increasingly interested in the social power of certain marine species to influence marine policy and affect marine spatial planning where it is otherwise lacking.

Potential 2025 project(s): As part of the Protected Species Division teams- students will be able to learn about a range of survey efforts that go into documenting marine mammal, turtle and fish (marine and anadromous) populations, distributions and habitat uses, as well as the tools and technologies we develop to minimize conflicts between these species and critical activities like commercial fishing, hydropower and offshore wind development. Students could develop a range of potential projects from working with animal telemetry data sets, evaluating performance of ropeless fishing technologies, diet analysis of necropsied animals, or developing conceptual essays on the role of charismatic taxa (protected by laws like the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection act) play in setting the course for marine resource conservation and preventing the tragedy of the ocean commons.

Type of work: In this project, student can learn about analyzing field data collected from animal tags and/or incorporating these data into marine spatial planning tools. Past students have learned or expanded skills working in R and Matlab. Student will also be encouraged to consider the significance of the results in the context of increasing human activity in the marine environment.

Mentor(s) and lab: Ken Foreman; YouTube Clip

Institution/Department: Marine Biological Laboratory, Ecosystems Center

Research Interests: Estuarine Biogeochemistry, Groundwater, Nutrient Pollution and Innovative Approaches to Nutrient Remediation

Potential 2025 project(s): Our lab has two projects with very different goals and approaches.

The first is studying the recovery of one of the first coastal ponds on Cape Cod to benefit from diversion of wastewater to sewers. In 2015-16, more than 1600 homes and businesses in the watershed surrounding Little Pond were connected to a sanitary sewer. The wastewater was and is transported out of the watershed for treatment and disposal. Prior to this, all wastewater was released to on-site septic systems that flowed in the groundwater and contaminated the pond. Although a lot is known about how excess nutrients impair water quality and damage coastal bays and estuaries, much less is understood about how these ecosystems recover after nutrient inputs are reduced. We have been tracking the changes in groundwater nutrient concentrations, which have declined by nearly 70%, since 2016 and are now studying the nitrogen budget and metabolism in the pond to track the recovery of the ecosystem.

The second project involves the addition of a wood chip bioreactor designed to foster denitrification (conversion of nitrate, a pollutant, to di-nitrogen gas, which comprises 79% of the atmosphere and is stable and harmless) to the Wareham Wastewater Treatment facility. This innovative approach to wastewater treatment is scaling up a pilot study that successfully removed nitrates from secondarily treated wastewater to a medium scale of 20,000 gallons per day. If successful at this scale, the approach could provide a cost effective alternative for wastewater treatment that would be applicable nationwide.

Type of work: Field work to collect samples and lab work to process and measure various parameters (e.g. dissolved nutrients, dissolved and particulate carbon, oxygen demand and metabolic processes, etc. in the samples). Students will learn chemical techniques and participate in research linked to local policy initiatives.

Mentor(s) and lab: Meagan Eagle, Environmental Geochemistry

Institution/Department: United States Geological Survey (USGS)

Research Interest(s): Carbon and greenhouse gas cycling, coastal wetlands, science to inform management

Potential 2025 project(s):

This summer my lab will be working on a variety of projects assessing carbon cycling in coastal wetlands.

The first is focused on the flow of carbon from salt marshes to the coastal ocean. Salt marsh grasses are very effective at removing CO2 from the atmosphere, some of which is quickly returned to the atmosphere, some stored as organic carbon in soils, and some exported in dissolved form to the coastal ocean. We are interested in processes, such as burial and export, that remove CO2 from the atmosphere and offer a natural carbon sink. During export of carbon, some evades to the atmosphere through air-sea exchange. This process is not well constrained in shallow waters and this project will measure that exchange as well as examine the role environmental drivers, such as water temperature, depth, and wind speed, play in returning carbon to the atmosphere.

The second project will look at vertical accretion and associated organic carbon burial across marshes that occupy varying elevations within the tidal frame to see how these marshes are responding to accelerating sea-level rise. Currently there is evidence for both increased and decreased accretion and carbon burial as salt marshes adapt to rapidly rising sea level. This is thought to largely be driven by plant responses to flooding with seawater-too little leads to build up of sulfide, a toxin, and too much results in salt and water stress. Beyond the plant response, we want to understand the role that mineral sediment deposition plays in supporting marsh growth and carbon burial at marshes with similar plant growth and sediment supply, but very different flooding regimes.

Type of work: Interns in my group will have the opportunity to work on large, collaborative projects assessing the interaction of wetland hydrology and carbon fluxes. To do this, we will be studying coastal wetlands local to Cape Cod, measuring things such as soil accretion, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, porewater geochemistry, and surface water fluxes. Coastal wetlands can be challenging environments to work in-they are muddy, hot, and sometimes buggy, but are always beautiful! Interns will have the opportunity to learn new field skills and laboratory techniques while working with a group of scientists from the USGS and academic partners. Depending on specific research focus, these include skills in greenhouse gas flux measurements; learn how to collect and analyze soil cores; learn a variety of laboratory methods; gain experience wetland carbon cycle research; and learn methods for record keeping, data analysis, and data presentation. Data analysis skills in R will be emphasized. Such activities are excellent preparation for geoscience careers.

Mentor(s) and lab: Scott Chimileski and Jessica Mark Welch

Institution/Department: Marine Biological Laboratory, Bay Paul Center for Comparative Molecular Biology and Evolution

Research Interest(s): Microbiomes, Bacterial interactions, microscopy and imaging

Potential 2025 project(s) and type of work: Animals use mucus to interact with bacteria. Mucus can be a sticky net that captures bacteria to keep some parts of an animal body clean, or mucus can be a food source to encourage growth of beneficial bacteria. We use microscopy to study the growth and organization of live bacteria from the human microbiome. Student projects will investigate how proteins from mucus (mucins) change how bacteria grow, spatially organize, and interact with each other. Students will learn how to cultivate bacteria, label and image bacteria using state-of-the-art microscopes, and analyze the image data. Most of the bacteria we study are from the human mouth, but projects could also involve marine microbes.

Mentor(s) and lab: Drs. Heidi Sosik, Rubao Ji and Mei Sato - NES-LTER Project

Institution/Department: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Biology Dept

Research Interest(s): Plankton ecology, food web dynamics, ecosystem observing and modeling

Potential 2025 project(s) and Type of work: The Northeast U.S. Shelf Long-Term Ecological Research (NES-LTER) project integrates observations, experiments, and models to understand and predict how planktonic food webs are changing in the region, and how those changes may impact the productivity of higher trophic levels. Research topics of particular interest include plankton ecology, food web dynamics, ecosystem observing and modeling. By joining this highly collaborative group, students will have the opportunity to interact with a large team of multi-disciplinary researchers involved in the NES LTER project. Participation in a 6-day research cruise may be possible.

Potential NES-LTER mentors in 2025 include Drs. Heidi Sosik, Rubao Ji and Mei Sato with research projects that may incorporate:

analysis of underwater imagery to map spatial and temporal variations in plankton community composition across the shelf;
analysis of acoustic data and net samples to examine zooplankton and fish distributions across the shelf break front; and
analysis of food-web or population dynamics using observational data and computer models.

Mentor(s) and lab: Kathleen Savage, Jennifer Watts

Institution/Department: Woodwell Climate Research Center

Research Interests: Forest ecology, trees, climate change, greenhouse gas fluxes

Potential 2025 project(s): Methane (CH4) is second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in its contribution to human-induced climate change. Understanding the emission (source) and uptake (sink) of CH4 from ecosystems is of critical importance if we are to implement global emission mitigation strategies, yet we understand very little about CH4 flux in forests, the processes and feedbacks driving net flux, and how emission or uptake will change under future climate.

Trees are increasingly recognized as significant contributors to forest CH4 budgets, however whether trees are a net source or sink of CH4 can depend on species and location within the landscape. The PEP student will conduct field research measuring CH4 fluxes from tree (conifer and deciduous) stems at multiple heights and foliage at the Howland Research Forest in Maine. Capturing foliar CH4 fluxes remains a challenge, and the PEP student will work with a novel, newly developed system to measure foliar CH4 fluxes.

This work aims to understand the drivers and magnitude CH4 fluxes from tree stems and foliage across the landscape of a northern sub boreal forest.

Type of work: This will be primarily in field work at the Howland Research Forest in Maine.

Mentor(s) and lab: Michael Brosnahan, Nour Ayache, Serena Sung-Clarke;

Institution/Department: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Biology Department

Research Interests: Harmful algal blooms, ocean acidification, phytoplankton physiology and ecology

Potential 2025 project(s): Our lab studies harmful algal blooms (HABs) that can be dangerous to human and marine life. Understanding the biology and ecology of the species that cause these blooms is important to monitoring and predicting toxic events. Example projects a student may work on include (1) performing laboratory studies examining the impact of ocean acidification on the growth and toxin production of a toxic dinoflagellate, (2) perform field samplings and measure changes in nutrient levels, toxin quotas, and changes in pH levels during a harmful algal bloom, (3) analysis of microscope images of toxic algal cells to identify visual changes during growth and decline of a bloom, (4) develop a local-scale model for predicting harmful algal bloom frequency and toxicity under changing climate conditions by comparing environmental data (e.g., nutrients, oxygen, pH) to the abundances of current HAB and non-HAB species. (5) expose shellfish organisms to HAB species and their associated toxins and monitor the effects on their development, ingestion rate, clearance rate. Students may also design their own small-scale field study or lab experiment based around any of these proposed ideas.

Type of work: Many of these projects involve both lab and field work. They may involve working with algal cultures, microscopy, shellfish, or toxin extractions. There will also be opportunities to do some water quality and cell sampling at a field site on the Cape Cod National Seashore. The student will also have opportunities to gain experience with data analysis and coding in Python.